DENNIS H. WRONG
99
mands for greater equality and participation are no more than expres–
sions of the interests of a "new class" of professional and public sector
intellectuals.
Yet when partisans of the Left denounce even their most moderate
critics as "enemies of the people," "spokesmen for dead and dying
classes," "roadblocks along the march of History," neoconservatives
are right to detect a totalitarian potential in such rhetoric-and this
was, of course, the fear that led to their coalescence as a group in the
ominous and feverish climate of the late sixties. For if democracy
legitimates the aspirations of the Left, it also legitimates resistance to
them. The role played by a conservative under democracy should be
that described in a little-known book by R.G. Collingwood of serving
as "a 'brake' on the vehicle of progress," not because he wants "to stop
the vehicle but
to
slow it down when it seemed likely to go too fast. "
One of the chief merits of Steinfels's book is that he clearly
acknowledges the legitimacy and even desirability of this role, al–
though it does not represent his own political choice. He notes that
some of his subjects have played or aspired to play it, notably Daniel
Bell among those whose views he examines in detail. Others, however,
have succumbed to the very spirit they attack. Steinfels goes to the heart
of the matter in the only one of his conclusions about the neoconserva–
tives that he chooses to italicize:
" The most debilitating weakness of
neoconservatism is its lack of respect for its political opponents.
In
this
it resembles, not surprisingly, the New Left against which it first
mobilized-the old tale of enemies mirroring one another. . . .
It
is here
that neoconservatism, as a serious strand of political thinking, is most
in danger of undoing itself." He goes on to locate this weakness in its
most pronounced form in the pages of
Commentary.
But if the questions of equality, social justice, and democratic
participation are going
to
continue to be raised, there is no reason to
suppose that there will be any repetition of the explosive conjuncture
of a dalliance with romantic revolutionism by elite segments of a
suddenly enlarged student population, a destructive outburst of rage by
blacks trapped in urban ghettoes, and a spreading middle-class protest
against a remote and brutal war justified by arguments that seemed to
have more
to
do with upholding a narrow view of the nation 's
reputation in the world than with any more tangible interest. Styles
and intensities of protest change quickly, but what of the actual
substance of policy making, of detailed programs, enactable reforms?
When Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell founded
The Public Interest
in
1965 in order to provide a forum in which the expertise of academic
